But painting didn’t pay the rent. He needed something practical. So to make money, he became a living statue of a white-winged angel on the other side of Harvard Square.
He wore a long white robe and gloves, dyed his hair a shocking white blond, and engineered and constructed the giant wings himself, out of papier-mâché and feathers. They were beautiful.
Since The Bride was such a conspicuous freak, I felt loudly ignored by those who walked by me without a single glance. I didn’t take it personally. At least, I tried not to.
So many people were hurrying to school or racing to work, chatting with their partners and otherwise occupied. I was ignored by probably 99 percent of all those who passed me on that sidewalk over my five or six years of Bride-ing. Which amounts to being deliberately ignored—while actively “performing”—by, I dunno, a few million people. This is why I highly recommend street performing over attending a conservatory to any musician, especially if they’re going into rock and roll: it wears your ego down to stubbly little nubs and gives you performance balls of steel.
Sometimes it was just a bad day, and it felt like nobody, and I mean nobody, would stop. Who knows why.
When that happened, I’d start performing for my own amusement, letting the melancholy of loneliness wash over me, tilting my head to one side sadly, slumping my shoulders a bit, and raising my hands up to heaven in a pitifully grand gesture:
Why, god, has everyone forsaken me?
I could convince myself so thoroughly that none of humanity was any good that I actually let a few sincere tears stream down my face, letting the people briskly walking by me serve as unwitting universal examples of just how cold and cruel the world really was.
I took The Bride on the road. The costume fit in a rolling toolbox that I could also stand on, and I carried her—she paid my way, in fact—to Australia, to Key West, to Los Angeles, to Vegas, to New York, to Germany. Busking in different environments was hard because I’d gotten into such a cozy rhythm in Harvard Square; some cities were more hospitable than others. My first day in the center of the French Quarter in New Orleans, I was not only yelled at by the other, highly territorial street performers, but some random jerk came up behind me and whispered that he was going to set my veil on fire, and a few minutes later, a horse drawing a touristy carriage stopped right next to me and peed all over my dress.
My hands were usually raised, herald-like, to one side, or piously clasped to my heart, or palms up to the sky like a star-shaped ballerina…but they were never outstretched for money. If people put money directly into my hand, which they would often try to do, it always felt wrong and uncomfortable. My hat was out for money, but my hands were out for something bigger.
Madelein Du Plessis sent me this story in the blog comments:
When I was a kid there was an article about a woman who went to India to help with a charity thing. All the beggar children would come for food and they would beg with their hands, palms up. After a long day, she went home and there was this little kid, stretching his arms out towards her. At first she thought the kid was begging, but then she saw that his palms were facing towards each other. Then she realized the kid was asking to be picked up and hugged. She ended up adopting the kid.
Madelein’s realization: They all needed food. This kid wanted more than food.
He also wanted love.
Anthony made me feel real.
He was born in 1948, and he regaled me with tales from the sixties that made my heart ache to turn back the clock and live in a time when everybody hitchhiked and smoked hash while listening to Joni Mitchell on crackly vinyl records. Anthony’s stories drew pictures in my teenage mind of wild, vital human beings creating a new reality in an upheaved world, protesting a war, running around with feathers in their hair and knives in their boots, tearing down the system and trying to score as many girls, drugs, and adventures as they could. I was jealous.
Anthony was raised in Boston in a big Italian-American family who’d made their fortune in the liquor and real estate businesses. The combination of his calm, Buddhist approach to life (he taught and introduced me to yoga, meditation, and the general concept of mindfulness), and the fact that he was a martial arts expert, would arm me with pepper spray before I went on long trips alone, and displayed an arsenal of exotic self-defense weapons in the study above the office where he saw his patients, never struck me as strange.
In my Hollywood biopic, he’d be Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, but played by Robert De Niro. In an overdramatic teenage flashback scene, I would confide in him that I’d been sexually assaulted by a boy from the high school. He would then narrow his eyes, make an Italian gesture in which he bit his folded tongue in half while wrinkling his nose, and say:
I’m going to find that guy and beat him to a pulp…
Then he’d put his hands in yoga prayer position over his heart, bow his head, and calmly add:
…with compassion.
We shared our stories on the phone, in long letters sometimes typewritten, sometimes handwritten, and eventually (once it existed) over email. Whenever we could, we connected in person, on long walks, over food, over coffee.
We made up absurd, fictional skits and scenarios about my lovers, our friends, our neighbors, ourselves. One of the skits starred a particularly skinny boyfriend of mine (who had a real-life penchant for wearing skirts) hitchhiking a ride on an eighteen-wheel truck to visit me in college and getting forcibly ejected from the passenger seat when the truck driver realizes he isn’t a girl, then being blown into the air by the blast of tailpipe exhaust as the truck pulls away, then magically being picked up by a passing breeze for a few hundred miles and floating through the metal grate above my basement dorm window, into the room, and onto my bed. We would tack on details of these skits over dozens of phone calls, making up absurd new characters, cracking each other up. We were ridiculous.
But as I got older, we shared more of the real things. Not just the entertaining stories, but the sad ones. The mean ones. The embarrassing ones. The scary ones. He told me his whole life, and I told him mine. Our love ran deep.
Anthony was also one of my patrons. He gifted me books on Buddhism and pocket knives. Occasionally, when he knew I was broke, he’d include a crisp hundred-dollar bill in a letter. When I was just out of college, surviving from statue paycheck to stripper paycheck, making my living in one-dollar bills, Anthony would sometimes front my rent money if I was tight on cash. I was once wiped out by a three-hundred-dollar speeding ticket I got on the Massachusetts Turnpike while racing to a gig as an artist’s model at a local art college. I had $250 in my bank account and my $350 rent was due. I borrowed the money from Anthony.
I swear I’ll pay you back, I promised.
I know you will, he answered. I would.
We used to talk about what would happen if he died. He’s more than twenty-five years older than me, and I worried about it. I once asked him, while we were lying on the adjacent couches of his study, what I should say at his funeral. Since I’d probably have to say something.
He gave this some thought. He said he’d like me to walk up to the front of the wake or memorial or whatever, carrying a stick.
What kind of stick?
Whatever kind of stick, he said. You know, a branch, a stick. A big one. One you can hold and everyone can see.
So you mean, like, a NATURAL stick. Not like…a martial arts stick. You mean like a…
WHATEVER kind of stick, he said, sounding annoyed. A stick from a tree. An ALL-PURPOSE stick. I’m trying to tell you something important here, clown.
Okay, I said, breathing out. You’re dead, I’m at the funeral. What do I do with the stick?
Don’t say anything, he told me. Just hold that sucker up in the air, break it in half, and throw it on the floor.
Everything breaks.
I had a hard time keeping boyfriends. They usually lasted about a year, then things would start to get real—or appear to start going in a potentially r
eal direction—and I would flee in terror. But I wasn’t very good at being independent either. I couldn’t stand to spend the night alone and was a serial drunk-dialer of exes.
They all told me I had a fear of intimacy, but I vehemently disagreed; I craved intimacy like a crack addict.
The problem was that I craved intimacy to the same burning degree that I detested commitment.
Being a statue was such a perfect job.
I loved all the handwritten notes people took the time to write and leave in the hat.
You’re beautiful.
Thank you for changing my day.
I’ve been watching you for an hour.
I love you.
The Bride was so easy to love.
She was silent.
She was blank, harmless, beatific…just loving people and giving them flowers.
She was perfect.
Because…who knew?
She could be anything.
Anyone.
In real life, I was the furthest thing from quiet, and the furthest thing from perfect. I gabbed nonstop, dressed flamboyantly, dyed my hair purple and red and green, repeatedly crashed my bike into cars, started prying conversations with strangers, and hammered on a piano in my bedroom while screeching angry songs about my pain at maximum volume in my spare time.
There was one very sweet-looking guy in his forties or fifties who, for an entire statue summer, gave me a twenty-dollar bill every time he saw me. My peripheral vision was excellent, and I could usually see what size bill people were dropping in my hat—unless they were going out of their way to hide it.
Day after day, I came to recognize him, and even expect him, and eventually we shared a tiny smile every time he passed by. It was a sweet, silent, secret little relationship.
Towards the end of the summer, he kicked around one day until my flowers ran out, and shyly approached me—would I have a cup of coffee with him?
Sure, I said.
I figured I owed it to him. I was impressed he’d even asked.
I went back to the ice-cream shop, changed into my civilian clothes, and we sat together in an outdoor café and chatted about life. He was a chemical engineer, from MIT, and slightly sad. He was nervous, not easy to talk to. I told him about my life: about writing music, about my wonderful crazy art-housemates at the Cloud Club, about living in Germany, what it was like to be a statue. He told me about his failed marriage. Two flawed human beings, sitting at the Au Bon Pain, exchanging mundane details. He’d clearly fallen in a forlorn sort of love with The Bride. Meeting me must have been such a disappointment.
I walked away from our coffee date feeling like I’d broken something beautiful.
I wanted to stay anyone.
It was easier.
Even if The Bride was slow-moving, it sometimes felt like life happened at light speed; thirty little secret love affairs with passersby in just under seventy minutes, and all the heartache that goes along with it.
I’m in love.
Nobody loves me.
I’m in love.
Nobody loves me.
I’d stand there like a dry plant, passively waiting to be watered.
Any source of nourishment would do. It was so simple, really, like the entirety of the human condition distilled down to a single idea:
Feeling alone. And then, not.
Every pair of gazing eyes that locked with mine, a reminder:
Love still exists.
When Neil and I first met, long after my street-performing days were over, we were both in relationships with other people, and we didn’t find each other all that attractive. I thought he looked like a baggy-eyed, grumpy old man, and he thought I looked like a chubby little boy. (A photograph taken on the day we first met provides credible evidence.) I now think he’s smashingly handsome, and he calls me “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Ain’t love grand?
We were introduced over email by my friend Jason Webley, whom I’d met when we were both busking at an Australian festival—me as The Bride, him scream-singing over his pirate-y accordion songs. I was crashing in Jason’s houseboat in Seattle the week Neil posted one of Jason’s homemade stop-motion videos to his own blog, causing the view-counts to soar into the tens of thousands.
Do you know Neil Gaiman? Jason asked. We were working on a songwriting collaboration: a weird side-project record based completely on puns called Evelyn Evelyn, in which we wrote, played, and sang as conjoined twin sisters with the same first name.
Neil Gaiman. Doesn’t he write comics? Isn’t he the Sandman dude? I’d never read anything he’d written, but I’d definitely heard his name.
Yes, him! He posted my “Eleven Saints” video on his blog yesterday and it got like fifty thousand hits. I just wrote him a thank-you note and he wrote back ten minutes later. He seems really nice.
A few days later, Jason and I were working on a radio-play-style script for our album, a ten-minute spoken account of the fictional twins’ horrific upbringing (their mother died in childbirth, then came a stint in the circus and a string of unseemly guardians, etc.). We were having a blast writing it, coming up with absurd details, but we wanted to run the text by someone to make sure the storyline was clear. Jason suggested we ask Neil.
But isn’t he kinda famous? I asked. Why not? Go for it. Ask.
It couldn’t hurt. He asked. Neil said yes, took a look at the radio play, and suggested a few changes. I wrote him a thank-you note. He was in Ireland at that time, he said in his response, alone in a borrowed house trying to finish a book about a little boy who grows up in a graveyard, and he had been sick with the flu for a full week. A few days later, I emailed and asked him how he was getting on. And a few days after that, I emailed and asked him who he actually was. He started telling me about his life, his book, his flu, his divorce. I told him about my life, my career, my record label troubles.
I was slaving over a book for the fans at the time, a compilation of macabre photographs to go along with my new album Who Killed Amanda Palmer. I’d gotten excited about the concept, and already had five or six great dead/naked-Amanda photos (I was, of course, mining my past and including the pictures from my dead/naked-Amanda performance-art college thesis), but had been told by my label that they didn’t have any budget to add artwork to the CD packaging. Instead of fighting them, I decided to simply publish the photos separately, in a book, and sell it directly from my website as a companion to the record. I figured it would be fun—and useful—to get a famous writer to create clever captions for the photos. I asked Neil. He said yes. A few months later, he came to Boston to work on the book. He didn’t want to write captions, he said; the photos looked more like whole stories to him, which would take more time to write. And he wanted to meet the corpse in person.
On our first day together, we took a walk to the Public Garden to get to know each other a bit before we hunkered down to work on the book. I asked him how his life was unfolding, how it felt to be him, and I was surprised at how readily forthright he was; he seemed so shy and guarded at first glance. He was going through a rough time. Our week was friendly and platonic.
We finished the book and stayed in touch every so often, getting on with our real lives and respective relationships. I released my album and embarked on a long tour. A few months later, Neil and I both happened to be in New York on his birthday and agreed to meet up for coffee. I was flummoxed about what to give him for a birthday present. What does one get Neil Gaiman, Celebrated Writer Of Fantasy And Science Fiction Novels? A special pen? A fancy journal? A fossil of a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth? A map of a black hole?
The Bride.
It was perfect. When I’d told him about my years as The Bride, he’d been delighted, and emailed me a story he’d written years before about a male living statue who stalks a woman, writing her creepy letters that he mysteriously leaves in her apartment.
He was having lunch with his literary agent that day, and would be free at four o’clock, so I asked him to com
e to Washington Square Park when he was done. I told him I’d be reading on a bench. It was November, and cold, so I waited a bit before setting down a locally filched milk crate in front of an empty fountain, ducking behind a tree, and putting on my Bride getup for the first time in a few years, inhaling its familiar cakey smell of sweat and makeup, and feeling floaty. I stepped up on the box at ten minutes to four, figuring I wouldn’t have long to wait.
After twenty minutes, I started to shiver and kept wondering if I should give up, but I didn’t want to get down and ruin the surprise, and I’d already suffered too long to let it go. There was construction in the park. Maybe he couldn’t find me. A few people stopped to get a flower. After thirty minutes, my fingers went numb, then my hands went numb, then my legs and arms froze. After about an hour, he appeared, accompanied by a woman, and approached me cautiously.
…Amanda? Is that you?
The Bride stayed silent. I stared at him and cocked my head. This was weird. He had come with someone, and I felt like I was embarrassing him. I’d noticed he was easily embarrassed.
He put a dollar in my hat and I gave him a flower. I tried to make eye contact with him, and he smiled goofily while the woman stepped back and laughed at our little exchange. I hopped down. I still felt like I was embarrassing him.
Well, er, Amanda, this is Merrilee, my literary agent! Merrilee, this is Amanda, you know, the…rock star lady. With the dead naked book…and all that. Merrilee smiled at me.
I pushed the veil out of my face, reached out my numb, gloved fingers, and shook her hand.
Hi.
The uncomfortableness lasted a few more minutes before Neil and I walked off to a nearby café, where I told Neil I would buy him a birthday hot chocolate. I took off my wig and Neil helped me carry the three milk crates.
My god, you’re freezing, he said. Your teeth are chattering. He took off his overcoat and draped it over my shoulders.
The Art of Asking Page 7